In recent months, we have seen millions of people around the world take to the streets to protest against climate change, demanding concrete responses to a crisis that is becoming increasingly urgent.
In Italy, around a million students skipped school to strike, just as the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg has been doing every Friday since August 2018, giving rise to the international movement Fridays For Future.
During that Friday for the Future a few weeks ago, the march of the young people stood out not only for the number of participants but also, and above all, for the slogans displayed on signs and banners.
Many observed that a lot of the phrases seen in the Italian protests were in English. This indicates that young people are becoming increasingly familiar with the language, but it also points to a strong connection between the web – especially social media – and this movement.
This leads to reflections on how the Internet is influencing the rhetoric of protest.
Slogan or Meme? (Or both?)
Think about the signs you saw: don’t they remind you of the memes you see around the web? Most likely, yes, and the reason is simple: some of them are actually memes, reproduced with marker on cardboard, either in their original language or translated into Italian.
Some examples?
There is “Make Earth Cool Again,” which clearly twists Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign slogan “Make America Great Again.”
There are quotes that always circulate well on social media: “Earth was created for all of us, not some of us,” read one sign, quoting the writer Anthony Douglas Williams.
Not to mention the many phrases taken from Greta Thunberg’s speeches, like “How dare you?” and “We must act as if our house is on fire. Because it is.”
Then there are the outright memes:“Save the Earth, it’s the only planet with arancini,” was written on one sign, a Sicilian twist on the English meme “Save the Earth, it’s the only planet with…” where beer, chocolate, or other delicacies are cited as reasons to fight for the planet.
Or, “La Terra sta diventando più hot di Alberto Angela,” mimicking the original “The Earth is getting hotter than…”: here, Italy’s beloved science communicator Alberto Angela serves as the local counterpart to various international sex symbols, whether real (young Leonardo DiCaprio) or humorous (Danny DeVito).
The Protest is Social
Everything we’ve seen so far should not surprise us. For nearly 10 years now – since the Arab Spring of 2011 – protest movements have identified social media as a valid tool for organization, dissemination, and communication. Consider the Turkish protests in Gezi Park in 2013, or the much more recent protests taking place on the streets of Hong Kong against the Chinese government.
In all these cases, we are talking about movements driven by young people who are familiar with web tools. This is even more true for protests against climate change, whose ambassadors are teenagers belonging to Generation Z, who have been accustomed to communicating via the Internet since birth. For them, online memes are more than legitimate means of cultural transmission.
What is a Meme?
A meme is any element – a trend, an idea, a stereotype – capable of spreading among people through imitation via dissemination and sharing, analogous to what a gene represents for genetics.
The term was coined in 1976 by biologist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene,” to define the smallest cultural unit capable of replication in human brains.
Imitation, indeed. This is how culture is transmitted and has always been transmitted.
The same applies to protest slogans, which are part of culture: they are created and repeated, taken up by others, often adapted to other situations, just like their advertising slogan counterparts.
(We’ll save the discussion on how advertising has adopted and re-adapted some of these slogans for another time.)
Consider the youth protests of the past and their battle cries.
“Another world is possible,” chanted the No Global movement in the early 2000s.
Or, going even further back in time, remember the famous slogans of ’68: “Imagination to power,” “Make love, not war,” “Put flowers in your guns.”
Le web c’est nous
What we have before us is a typically human phenomenon, which the web and social media simply accelerate and amplify, as in many other cases. When we hear about the web, we shouldn’t think of it as a strange and mysterious entity that influences people: the web is made up of people who communicate and exchange ideas. The Internet and social media are tools, the tools that the youth of Fridays For Future and other ecological movements have chosen to carry on an extremely important battle that concerns everyone. Climate change is much more urgent and important than any other issue and must be fought with every weapon at our disposal. Yes, even with memes about Alberto Angela 🙂
Sources
- Il Corriere della Sera, Fridays For Future, i migliori cartelloni sul clima
- Wired, I cartelli (creati dai designer) da scaricare e usare ai Fridays For Future
- Wikipedia, Meme
